I'm having lunch with Dana Cowin. Foodies everywhere would kill to be able to say that. As editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine, Cowin ’82 is one of the country’s most influential gourmands. Over the past seventeen years she has made Food & Wine
the top food magazine in the United States, steadily growing its
circulation and expanding its influence. It hasn’t been easy.

Dustin Fenstermacher

Cowin
sees Food & Wine as the place where everyone from a small-town mom
with an adventurous cooking streak to a Michelin-starred chef can turn
to find out what's new- to be surprised.

When Cowin took the reins at Food & Wine
in 1995, the nation’s current obsession with food and chefs was in its
infancy. The Food Network had launched only two years before. Iron Chef, Top Chef, and other reality cooking shows wouldn’t appear for another decade or more. And Food & Wine, founded in 1978, was “the third book in a two-book category dominated by Bon Appetit and Gourmet,” says Ed Kelly, CEO of American Express Publishing, which publishes Food & Wine.
“Now, within that group, one is gone, and the other is a struggling
also-ran. The tables have flipped upside down under Dana’s leadership.”
As a result of Food & Wine's
success, Cowin earlier this year received one of the food industry's
most coveted honors when she was inducted into the James Beard
Foundation's Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America, taking her
place alongside Mario Batali, Martha Stewart, Madhur Jaffrey, and Tim
and Nina Zagat.

Through it all, Cowin has maintained a sort of star-struck naiveté.
It’s as if she’s a schoolgirl dropped into a room full of movie stars;
she can’t get over how lucky she is. When two of New York’s top
sommeliers walked in during our lunch at ABC Kitchen (which is just
north of Manhattan’s Union Square), she burst out, “Ooooh!” and waved
enthusiastically. “Robert Bohr!” she said. “Love him!” Cowin doesn’t
write about food very often, she says, “because it’s really hard. The
people who are good at it, I worship at their feet. And there are not
many of them.”

With that in mind, here goes: Lunch begins with kale salad. It comes
out alongside three slices of crusty bread in a rough-hewn wood bowl
and a plate of fiddlehead ferns, compliments of the chef. The kale is
lemony and tart, with a spicy kick, and the fiddleheads, available only
a few weeks each year, taste like garlic and earth. “This place is
alarmingly good,” Cowin says.

Part of the high-end decorating store ABC Carpet & Home, the
restaurant’s décor is a mash-up of rustic and modern, as if someone had
crossed a barn with an abandoned warehouse furnished by Mies van der
Rohe. The feel of the place reflects its farm-to-table New American
menu, and this synergy of design with food and drink is what makes Food & Wine tick. Because, despite its name, Food & Wine is not just about food and wine.

“The idea is to talk about life, but with food at the center,” Cowin
says. “There’s this life that we talk about that we call the ‘always
hungry’ life. They’re always hungry,” she says of her readers. “They
always want more information. They’re adventurous. They’ll try new
things; they’ll travel for food. The central idea is that somebody
would have food and wine at the center of their life, and everything
else would revolve around that.”

It would be easy to sell magazines by running five-minute microwave
recipes or splashing pictures of Anthony Bourdain or other celebrity
chefs on the cover. Cowin has chosen a different approach. Food & Wine
contains plenty of recipes, of course, but Cowin has been masterly at
giving readers instructions for food they can prepare while goading
them to take their passion for food to the next level. She likes to see
Food & Wine as the place where everyone from a small-town
mom with an adventurous cooking streak to a Michelin-starred chef can
turn to find out what’s new—to be surprised.

“We hope it’s not intimidating,” she says. “I really don’t believe that
everything should be a thirty-minute meal. And I don’t believe that
everything should be supermarket ingredients. One thing that has led to
the magazine’s success is a balance between the aspirational and the
practical. In every issue, we’re really, really conscious of delivering
both.”

With a median household income of $160,000, many readers of Food & Wine
can afford to be aspirational in ways the rest of us cannot. For us,
the magazine is a masochistically delicious cascade of beautiful meals
you’ll never eat at restaurants you can’t afford in destinations you
can only dream of visiting: Tangier, Uruguay, Alsace, and Lyon. And
yet, alongside every dish is a recipe, ranging from simple (mozzarella
with summer squash and olive puree) to elaborate (baked seafood
dumplings with saffron sauce and Swiss chard). Can’t afford a trip to
Napa Valley’s hot new restaurant Oenotri to try their Pizza with Garlic
Cream and Nettles? Make it yourself.

Food & Wine features such articles as “the Costco
Challenge,” in which a celebrity chef is set loose in the warehouse
store, and “Wine Lover’s Guide to Party Planning,” which suggests “the
best buys in wine, food and style” at Target, Trader Joe’s, and Whole
Foods. “I’m really interested in what people actually do,” Cowin says.
“They actually go to Costco and Target.” The flip side of that is
inspiration. “I want to inspire people to do things that they maybe
wouldn’t have thought of doing.”

As soon as our lunch arrives, Cowin spoons bites of her chicken salad
onto my plate. When I protest, she insists that “in the food world, you
share. If you don’t share, you’re weird.” The salad is tossed in a
light vinaigrette, slightly sweet with a hint of heat. In the salad are
whole tiny carrots, battered and fried. Those carrots—crisp on the
outside, sweet and soft on the inside—are one of the highlights of the
meal.

In return, I tell her to help herself to bites of my tuna burger and
fries—“I’m going to,” she says. “I wouldn’t actually give that a second
thought”—and she does, reaching over throughout our conversation to dip
the golden fries dusted with fresh rosemary into the aioli on my plate.
We talk about how delicious the food is, but we don’t dwell on it.
Dissecting in too much detail why a meal is special or satisfying,
Cowin says, can ruin it.

“The key to being a good food writer is actually being a good fiction
writer,” she says. “If you can write fiction—draw a scene, make
characters, come up with metaphors, tell a story that goes from
beginning to middle to end—that’s your best qualification. Every dish
is a narrative. Every meal is a narrative. Every restaurant is a
narrative. Every dinner party is a narrative. Without the narrative,
it’s just a bunch of ingredients put together.”

Later that afternoon Cowin walks into a spotless, beautifully appointed
kitchen ten stories above Times Square, where Justin Chapple is
de-veining shrimp. Chapple, a lanky blonde with striking blue eyes, is
one of the magazine’s three full-time cooks, and the Food & Wine
test kitchen has three of everything: Sub-Zero refrigerators, sinks, ranges and ovens, butcher-block counter space. Chapple has
just finished preparing a plate of tacos with fingerling potatoes,
kale, and chorizo. “Have you had fun testing these recipes?” Cowin asks
him.

Oh, my god," Chapple says. "So much fun. Everything is so different."

Dustin Fenstermacher

Cowin's
interest in wine has grown along with that of her readers. "We are the
magazine for the wine enthusiast who just wants to understand it
better," she says.

Each year Cowin edits several Food & Wine books,
including cookbooks and a wine-and-cocktail guide. Chapple is testing
recipes for a new annual cookbook that Cowin is calling the Discovery
Series. This new book will showcase ten cooks, each of whom will
contribute ten recipes, with art shot by ten different photographers.
Discovering new talent, Cowin says, is one of the most fun and most
important parts of her job. The magazine does this all year, but once a
year a special issue showcases ten Best New Chefs, a designation that
can make careers and rescue faltering restaurants.

“One of her favorite days of the year is when she gets to call our Best
New Chefs and tell them that they’ve been selected,” says Cowin’s
deputy editor, Christine Quinlan. “Without fail, there’s always
somebody who thinks they’ve been punked, someone who’s in tears,
someone who’s cursing in public.”

Best New Chefs like David Chang or Thomas Keller are unknown when they
are selected, but then “go on to do just incredible things,” Cowin
says. “I’m trying to think of a way to say this without sounding
conceited, but we don’t make a lot of mistakes when we pick talent.
People come to rely on the magazine for finding new talent, and the new
talent is so proud of having been found that they help promote the
magazine.”

As the Best New Chefs demonstrates, Cowin has transformed Food & Wine from a magazine into a brand. Each summer the chefs are fêted at the Food & Wine
Classic, an extravagant, star-studded weekend in Aspen, Colorado.
It is one of seventeen events that the magazine puts on each
year—opportunities, Cowin says, to maintain a personal connection with
readers and “bring the magazine to life in three dimensions.” The Food & Wine
brand now includes the print magazine, events, an active social media
presence (including Cowin’s own lively Twitter feed), books, iPad and
other tablet versions of the magazine, and a content-packed,
aesthetically engaging, and revenue-producing website. “The breadth of
the brand,” Cowin says, has helped solidify Food & Wine’s place.

Make no mistake: the magazine is still the brand’s core. Food & Wine
is always evolving, Cowin says. Interest in wine among the general
public, for example, has increased dramatically over the last decade.
In the past, readers serious about wine, she says, “had a geeky
magazine which had point scores. But we are the magazine for the wine
enthusiast who just wants to understand it better.”

Cowin is one of those editors whose antennae are always up. “This
ingredient I’ve seen at five other places!” Cowin told deputy editor
Quinlan recently over a meal. “Maybe there’s a story here!” Quinlan
adds: “The wheels are always turning.”

Food & Wine has in the past several years devoted a lot more
space to mixed drinks, which have become an important trend in the food
world. Until then, those who love the kooky names and great stories
about cocktails but don’t necessarily want to dissect every ingredient
“didn’t have a general interest magazine that was really for them,”
Cowin says. “If you love cocktails and food, then we become the
magazine for you. All of these side groups have a home at Food & Wine. We see it all as part of a lifestyle.”

“Dana is, in a world where that’s becoming rarer and rarer, one of the
most principled people I know,” says Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel
Channel show Bizarre Foods
and a food celebrity in his own right. Zimmern said that where other
magazines beg him to appear in their pages—“I’m not humble-bragging,”
he says. “I have a TV show. So I’m a recognizable face and name; it
helps sell magazines”—it took Cowin three years to hit on a way to work
with Zimmern that felt true to Food & Wine’s brand identity. “If
you’re trying to create an image for a magazine and what a magazine
stands for, you need to have a really keen understanding of what the
magazine is about,” Zimmern says, “and it’s really hard to stick to
your guns.”

Cowin’s introduction to the magazine world came when her former Brown
English professor, the late Roger Henkle, landed her an entry-level job
at Vogue,
where one of her tasks was to edit the magazine’s monthly wine column.
The text, she concedes with a laugh, was unreadable “before I got it,
and after I got it. I was not Mrs. Added Value.”

But the magazine introduced her to the “food lifestyle” idea, she says:
“the place where food, design, entertaining, wine all intersected.” The
decorators and fashion designers that the magazine profiled all lived
what Cowin describes as “pretty lives,” and she was drawn to their
beautiful houses and the elegant way they set a dinner table. To this
day, Cowin says, “I love houses. I love design. I love the way people
live. I love objects. I love artisans.” And she loves entertaining. She
and her husband, Reuters producer Barclay Palmer, and their two kids,
Sylvie, 12, and William, 9, spend weekends in upstate New York, and
they often invite friends to come along.

With short brown hair, a petite frame, and a preference for dress
blazers in bright colors or bold prints, Cowin certainly doesn’t look
like someone who eats for a living. Born and raised on New York’s Upper
East Side—from the roof of her current apartment building she can see
the one where she grew up—Cowin says she comes from “a total non-food
household. My mother literally does not cook. I don’t think she has
ever cooked me a complete meal. She subsists on English muffins,
chocolate bars, and going out. That’s not even an insult to her. It’s
just a fact.” When, during and after college, Cowin discovered that she
liked entertaining, she taught herself some simple dishes in order to
have friends over. “And,” she adds, “maybe find a boyfriend.”

But, Cowin says, “I don’t pick up a pot or a pan during the week.” If
she isn’t eating out for work—and, she says, she tries not to do so
more than two nights a week so she can be home to put her kids to
bed—dinner is usually something easy and fast, like yogurt. “But on a
weekend, a Saturday, I will just spend all day standing at the stove,
or chopping at the counter, or shopping or marketing.” Her idea of a
happy Saturday, she says, is going to a flea market and a farmers
market. “I love shopping for food. Love it. If I do not go to a farmers
market, I actually feel incomplete.”

In the early days at Food & Wine,
Cowin says, the work was simpler. There was no Pinterest or Tumblr or
iPad edition. She edited a magazine. And yet, “I worked every single
weekend, and I worked every night until 9 or 10 o’clock. When I think
about that, it’s comical. What could I have been doing?” She chuckles
as she recalls it. “Part of it was, I was trying to reimagine
something. But part of it”—she pauses, laughs some more—“I mean, I
needed to get a life.”

Now she grapples with a very different problem. In Aspen this summer,
Cowin sat down for a two-and-a-half-minute interview with the website
genConnect. How do you balance your career and kids? the host asked.
How do you make time for yourself? “I have no time for myself,” Cowin
says. But “every minute that I’m doing my job, I love. And every minute
I’m with my kids—” she pauses, considers. “Well, 99 percent of the time
I love being with my kids. But that’s my time, actually. I don’t need
the separate extra time. I’m not sure what that separate extra time
would be. Because my days are filled with fun.”

Although she’s a tough critic with a strong point of view, Cowin often
describes herself as “pathologically positive.” Coworkers describe her
as relentlessly upbeat and supportive. “Dana is incredibly loyal to her
staff, and does everything she can to try to take care of them,” says
Quinlan. The magazine had never had a deputy editor before, she says,
but Cowin, impressed by Quinlan, invented the position in order to
promote her. “You don’t have to ask for all of these things,” says
Quinlan. “When you work hard, it’s recognized and rewarded.”

Cowin first earned the pathologically positive descriptor in 2008,
after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent both radiation and chemotherapy. She wrote about her
experience in an essay in O, The Oprah Magazine.
“After her diagnosis,” the introduction read, “Dana Cowin saw three
choices: (1) feel sorry for herself, (2) hole up alone, or (3)
celebrate the things that matter most.”

The essay, called “Is This Any Time for a Party?” described the series
of “cancer parties” Cowin threw during the year that she has come to
describe as “my year of breast cancer.” One party had an
if-life-gives-you-lemons-make-lemon-meringue-pie theme. “My friends
would bring both savory and sweet pies,” Cowin wrote: “Quiche, apple,
chocolate pecan, and of course lemon meringue. And my mother would
host. No way did I want to cook or clean up for a big group of people.
I’d been feeling relatively well, but not that well.”

Another party, timed to coincide with her double mastectomy, was a
ladies-only Soul Sisters party, with a 1970s-style dress code, platters
of soul food, and bottles of Strong Arms Shiraz. At another, Cowin made
a toast that Food & Wine
publisher Christina Grdovic says has stayed with her ever since. “I
just want to tell everybody,” Cowin said, raising her glass, “stop
saying you can’t find the time. To learn photography, or learn a new
language, or go to the gym, or spend time with your kids. I definitely
didn’t think I had time to go to chemo every day for sixty days. But
you know what? I found the time.”

“It’s weird to say,” Cowin concedes now, “but I had a very good year.”
She reconnected with old friends, who cooked for her and accompanied
her to chemotherapy. “Drip buddies,” she called them. “My husband likes
to remind me it was indeed stressful. And I was sick. But my immediate
emotional reaction was sort of positive. And then you get all this
positive reinforcement for having reacted positively to cancer. Then
you feel really great about yourself!” Cowin knows how lucky she is: “I
wouldn’t want to fight the demon that is the sadness about illness,
because that’s really, really, really hard.” But, for the most part,
she says, “it just didn’t come.” Cowin has been cancer-free for more
than four years now. After five, she will be considered, as she puts
it, “done with that cancer.”

Grdovic says that Cowin’s reaction to her diagnosis is reflective of
her approach to life in general: “If you can take something as horrible
as cancer on with a positive attitude, imagine how great it is to take
on things like food and wine and parties and entertaining, that are
really fun to begin with.”

At our ABC Kitchen lunch, we decide to share the salted caramel ice
cream sundae for dessert. The subtle flavor of the ice cream, served in
a sea of chocolate sauce, is set off by the crunchy, salty sweetness of
the candied peanuts and caramel popcorn sprinkled on top. With the
toppings so reminiscent of peanuts and cracker jack, I am surprised to
discover that each mouthful tastes nostalgically, whimsically,
exuberantly like the circus.

Ultimately, it’s that moment of surprise—the discovery of some amazing
piece of furniture at a flea market, an idea shared over a meal that
might change the world, the summer’s first perfect ripe tomato—that
makes Cowin say that she has the world’s best job. “I personally think
that every day, if you’ve had an adventure in taste, your day is better
for it,” she says. “I hope we’ve helped people expand their happy
world.”

Beth Schwartzapfel is a contributing editor.

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The Brown Alumni Magazine is published bimonthly, in print since 1900.